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A proposed Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which is supported by President Obama but has not yet been ratified by Congress, will subordinate U.S. naval and drilling operations beyond 200 miles of our coast to a newly established U.N. bureaucracy. If approved, it will grant a Kingston, Jamaica-based International Seabed Authority (ISA) the power to regulate deep-sea oil exploration, seabed mining, and fishing rights.

As part of the deal, as much as 7% of U.S. government revenue that is collected from oil and gas companies operating off our coast will be forked over to ISA for redistribution to poorer, landlocked countries. This apparently is in penance for America’s audacity in perpetuating prosperity yielded by our Industrial Revolution.

Under current law, oil companies are required to pay royalties to the U.S. Treasury (typically at a rate of 12 ½% to 18%) for oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico and off the northern coast of Alaska. Treasury keeps a portion, and the rest goes to Gulf states and to the National Historic Preservation Fund. But if LOST is ratified, about half of those Treasury revenues, amounting to billions, if not trillions of dollars, would go to the ISA. We will be required to pay 1% of those “international royalties” beginning in the sixth year of production at each site, with rates increasing at 1% annual increments until the 12th year when they would remain at 7% thereafter.

Like the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol debacle that preceded it, this most recent LOST cause embodies the progressive ideal of subordinating the sovereignty of nation states to authoritarian dictates of a world body. The U.S. would have one vote out of 160 regarding where the money would go, and be obligated to hand over offshore drilling technology to any nation that wants it… for free.

And who are those lucky international recipients? They will most likely include such undemocratic, despotic and brutal governments as Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe…all current voting members of LOST.

The treaty was originally drafted in 1968 at the behest of Soviet bloc and Third World dictators interested in implementing a scheme to weaken U.S. power and transferring wealth from industrialized countries to the developing world. It had been co-authored by Elisabeth Mann Borgese, a socialist and admirer of Karl Marx who ran the World Federation of Canada. In a 1999 speech she declared: “The world ocean has been and is so to speak, our great laboratory for making a new world order.” Recognizing this as a global grab, President Reagan thought it was such a lousy idea that he not only refused to sign, but actually fired the State Department staff that helped negotiate it.

The treaty has been pitched as an effort to protect the world’s oceans from environmental damage and to avoid potential conflicts between nations. Accordingly, ISA would settle international maritime and jurisdictional disputes, possibly even to the extent of overriding our U.S. Navy’s freedom of navigation and governing where ships can and cannot go. ISA’s prerogative to do so would be entirely consistent with a “global test” definition advocated by key LOST proponent Senator John Kerry in 2004.

The treaty contains a clause empowering the ISA to take whatever steps it deems necessary to stop "marine pollution." According to William C. G. Burns of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, its expansive definition of pollution could be read to include "…the potential impact of rising sea surface temperature, rising sea levels, and changes in ocean pH as a consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide in sea water." Burns warns that this could "give rise to actions under the Convention's marine pollution provisions to reduce carbon emissions worldwide.” He warns that this can easily be expanded to include anti-global warming measures, and since it would be “self-executing”, U.S. courts can be used to enforce it.

Powerful environmental organizations love LOST because it will afford a legal system for dispute resolution which culminates in a 21-member international tribunal (ITLOS) based in Hamburg which can be enforced against American companies without possibilities of U.S. court appeal. Numerous lawsuits charging global warming dangers linked to greenhouse emissions from ships will most likely supersede binding rules of the discredited Kyoto Protocol which the U.S. wisely never ratified.

The U.S. Navy maintains that we need LOST to guarantee free transit in dangerous waters, such as in the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has threatened to block, and in the South China Sea which is dominated by China. Yet freedom of navigation has been recognized under international law for centuries. It was policed by the British Navy over 400 years, and by ours since 1775. Since the U.N. has no navy, it will still be up to us to continue this role.